E ach quarter, we celebrate Get to Know Your Customer Day, a time for business owners and CEOs to take a deeper look at what their customers need, analyze buyer behavior and create strategies for building relationships. As a CEO, your time is precious, but we’ve got plenty of tips you can implement quickly and efficiently to get you on the road to creating deeper, more meaningful and more profitable connections with your customers.
10 Tips to Get to Know Your Customers Better
Tip #1: Put Yourself in Their Shoes
You can’t offer your customers what they want until you understand what they need . Building a positive customer experience fosters trust and builds loyalty, but first, you have to carefully analyze your buyer journey from their perspective. Do your product offerings match up with the value and quality your customers are seeking? In the midst of this year’s uncertainty and instability, are you meeting their health and safety expectations? Is your customer service consistently above par? If your business is online, do a quick run-through of the purchase process from your customer’s POV. If you’re a brick and mortar, ask an employee to walk you through everything that happens at the point of purchase.
Tip #2: Meet Them Where They Are
This year, more than ever, customers are making purchase decisions in the virtual space, and many times, that happens on social media. Whether they’re searching for reviews, researching your brand or clicking on an ad, your buyers are ready to engage. This is a perfect opportunity to conduct a quick audit of your social channels, check in on how they’re performing and figure out where your customers are most active. If your followers find you on YouTube, are you providing fresh, relevant video content? Do you follow the other brands and businesses they follow? Do you respond to comments and DMs in a timely manner? Consider utilizing a social listening tool that will help you track what people are saying about your business and what they’re saying about your competitors.
Tip #3: Understand What Keeps Them Coming Back
Are your customers loyal to your business, or do they come and go at will? When you understand how to build customer retention , you’ll create customers for life. Consider implementing a loyalty program tailored to your customers’ needs. Offer discounts, free products or store credit, and analyze customer response to determine what really motivates them.
Tip #4: Invite Their Feedback
For communication to work, it has to go both ways. Surveys are a quick and efficient way to understand what customers want, what they dislike and the factors that influence their buying decision. Tools like SurveyMonkey make building and distributing surveys easy and fast.
Tip #5: Get Personal
You greet friends and family by name, so why not customers as well? Personalized emails and other communications reinforce the relationship you’re building with customers and make them feel like they’re more than just a credit card number. Marketing automation makes it easy to personalize messages with names, location, previous purchases or suggested products based on shopping history.
Tip #6: Be Responsive
It’s easy to respond to positive reviews, but it’s just as important to respond to the negative ones. Failing to acknowledge less-than-stellar reviews gives customers the perception that you don’t care, or that you don’t engage. Customers want to feel that their voices are heard, and reviews – whether good or bad – are vital in getting to know them better. Remember that this requires more than simple acknowledgment of the issue; you must also take steps to fix it.
Tip #7: Get Real in Real-Time
This is an especially important tip for CEOs and owners of online businesses . The virtual space can make customers feel disconnected from your brand, but it’s easily remedied by giving them real-time communications options, like chatbots or live chat customer service.
Tip #8: Make It a Two-Way Street
As a CEO, you aren’t just the face of your business, you’re its heart and soul. Get to know your customers by letting them get to know you. In 2020, with so many more online shoppers, it’s never been easier. Host a live chat on Facebook, or offer an AMA (Ask Me Anything) to engage with your customers in a socially distant, but socially engaging way.
Tip #9: Make Sure They Can Find You
You can’t get to know customers if they never show up. Make it easier for them to find you by tightening up your SEO, creating a Google My Business profile and securing a virtual phone to make customer contact seamless. Check out our list of recommended services and products , because, hey, at Bizee, we’re about much more than just business formation — we want your business to grow!
Tip #10: Share Their Stories
Finally, an important tip that will help you get to know your customers and engage with new ones. Ask your customers to share their stories of using your products or services, then share them far and wide. User Generated Content (UGC) is a powerful tool to build relationships and nurture leads.
And now it’s our turn! We want to get to know Bizee customers and give them the opportunity to be featured as our Spotlight of the Month. Share your business story with us, and we may share your journey with the entire Bizee audience!
